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Lara J. Martin

@laramartin.net

447 followers 501 following 142 posts

Applying and improving #NLP/#AI but in a safe way. Teaching computers to tell stories, play D&D, and help people talk (accessibility). Assistant Prof in CSEE @ UMBC. 🏳️‍🌈♿ laramartin.net

Posts Replies Media

Lara J. Martin @laramartin.net · 11/11/2025

In this work, we introduce a new human evaluation of #LLMs called Representation Alignment. Representation Alignment looks at the similarity between how LLMs use conceptual representations and how humans interpret them.

Diagram of Representation Alignment evaluation. Four different emotion representations are passed to an LLM, along with keywords (e.g., wake, cat, morning). Each of these sentences are shown to the user, who has to pick the best-fitting sentence to the emotion representation they see.

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Lara J. Martin @laramartin.net · 13/08/2025

Or maybe your dreams as a janitor will lead you to be the captain of your very own garbage ship!

Cover art for Sierra's old game. Space Quest V: Roger Wilco - The Next Mutation. Roger is holding a mop and surrounded by all sorts of aliens all standing waist-high in green goo

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Lara J. Martin @laramartin.net · 18/03/2025

The LARA Lab has a new paper out looking at the alignment (or lack there of) of #LLMs like #GPT and #LLaMA with human perceptions of emotions. Turns out the representation of the emotion matters! Shout out to @namer.bsky.social and Asha Kumar for their amazing work! arxiv.org/abs/2503.11881

A diagram of one of the experiments in the paper:
An LLM gets an emotion representation and some keywords and a human picks the best generated sentence that matches that emotion.

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Lara J. Martin @laramartin.net · 13/03/2025

Since when has our mascot basically become a shrine? It's kind of cute. #umbc

Statue of UMBC's mascot True Grit, a dog. People put pennies in front of it and it's wearing a cowboy hat

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Lara J. Martin @laramartin.net · 16/12/2024

Unlike paying someone to do your assignment or copying a friend's, students don't seem to know how well AI is actually doing the assignment. We're really going to see a paradigm shift in teaching where we teaching higher-level skills (analyzing and evaluating) far earlier on than we used to.

Bloom's Taxonomy for teaching, image from the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. At the bottom is "remember" followed by "understand", "apply", "analyze", "evaluate", and with "create" at the top.

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Lara J. Martin @laramartin.net · 12/12/2024

Students from my Interactive Fiction and Text Generation class presented their final projects today, and it was amazing! I opened it up to the department, and faculty & students got to see all the fun AI work people did this semester. There were so many cool research projects and demos.

Students present posters to their peers and visitors.

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